Users of electronic devices often have to insert an address that is an electronic address, also referred to as e-mail address, a phone number, or any other address to identify a recipient, person or object. For that the users have to remember the detailed address for those people for which they did not create an entry in their electronic address book, but still might communicate to quite frequently. Some known e-mail clients, for example, offer a complementation or completion of the address which was entered partly. However, even if the user is connected to a remote address book, or has entered a large enough number of address records in the address book, e-mail address completions often proposes a “wrong” e-mail address supplement. The reason for this is that today's e-mail clients do an alphabetical sequential search of the address book for matching records. Despite the fact that the user might send quite often mail to “Steven Anderson”, the fact that there is also an “Andy Anderson” in the address book does mean that when typing “Anderson” in the e-mail client and waiting for the address completion this will result in “Andy Anderson” being displayed. The same applies to other kinds of addresses, e.g. mail addresses, phone numbers, etceteras.
The e-mail client Endora (Eudora is a registered trademark of QUALCOMM Incorporated) provides a mechanism called “Automatic Name Completion” which is described in the user manual http://www.eudora.com/download/eudora/windows/5.2/Manual.zip on pages 32 to 34. When completing a name or e-mail address in the field such as the “To” field, Eudora not only displays entries from the users address book, but it also searches for matches in a so-called “history file” and displays entries found in there. The Eudora history file consists of names and e-mail addresses of people the user previously sent messages to within Eudora. While to a lesser degree, the same drawbacks as mentioned above apply also here.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,405,243 describes a network-based method and system for forwarding an email message to an updated email address. After a user changes his or her email address, the user sends information regarding the updated email address to an address-change server used in conjunction with the present invention. The address-change server stores the updated email information in its database. When a sender wants to reach a recipient whose email address has changed, the sender sends an email message to the address-change server. The address-change server forwards the updated email address to the sender. The sender's email program programmatically forwards the sender's email message to the recipient's new email address.
From the above it follows that there is still a need in the art for an improved mechanism for offering and completing an address when only portions of a name or address have been entered or are available. This shall lead to more user friendly and effective support systems.